1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the support of on-demand pause-resume in a central video server.
2. Related Art
The feature of pause-resume is one of the most common operations in VCR. Recently, it has become increasingly popular to develop multimedia servers to support video-on-demand (VOD) applications. In a VOD environment, there are often hot videos which are requested by many viewers. The requirement that each viewer can independently pause the video at any instance and later resume the viewing has caused difficulties in batching of viewers on each showing.
In one conventional approach to support on-demand pause-resume, one video stream is provided for each viewer video request. For each multimedia server, there is a maximum number of video streams to the disks that can be supported. This upper limit will be referred to as N.sub.MAX. Thus, the abovedescribed approach can only support N.sub.MAX viewers.
In another conventional approach to the pause-resume problem, video streams for "hot" (popular) movies are scheduled such that they commence at fairly close intervals. In response to receipt of a resume command from a viewer (after having received a pause) the server assigns to the viewer one of the video streams for the same movie which is scheduled to reach the proper resume point in the near future. One problem with such a system is that the viewer must wait until a stream reaches the proper resume point before the movie can be viewed from the point at which the viewer paused.